Sony Ericsson today showed off its latest Bluetooth watches, three of which are aimed at the lady in your life, though those with more svelte companions might have to look elsewhere for Christmas gifts.

There's a new lobby group in town - but unusually, this one unites traditional adversaries from tech, telecoms, and media companies. Backers include the American Songwriters Guild representing creators, Microsoft, Cisco, and AT&T, and media companies including Viacom and NBC. Everyone but Google, it seems.

Following a recent spate of pirate attacks* off the Horn of Africa, reportedly Her Majesty's Royal Navy has been powerless to act following official concern over possible violations of the buccaneers' human rights - and worries that they might seek asylum in the UK after being captured.

A North Tyneside farmer is evidently unaware of the extensive research which has been dedicated to probing the delicate matter of ovine homosexuality, and has dismissed clear evidence of his flock indulging in boy-on-boy as a simple bit of rough and tumble

European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes is proposing a radical shake up of telco competition in Europe which she hopes will stimulate aggressive deployment of fibre to the home across Europe - what the Commission calls Next Generation Access (NGA).

The far-reaching effects of the US financial crisis are starkly demonstrated by the impending ejection onto New York's mean streets of a Chihuahua named Chico - canine star of the theatrical adaptation of Legally Blonde.

Microsoft will be showboating Windows Vista, mark two 7 at its forthcoming Professional Developer Conference (PDC) event next month, where developers will be able to get their mitts on a pre-beta build of the operating system.

The government will drop plans for a massive central database to track private communications from the forthcoming Communications Data Bill, but officials will proceed with the multi-billion project in the background instead.

News emerged today that government plans for a compulsory UK national ID card pilot scheme in the airline industry are deadlocked by industrial and union opposition, casting a blight over the unveiling of the cards' design.

Erstwhile HD DVD heavyweight Toshiba has forecast the end of consumer optical media, and is to develop a series of set-top boxes and portable players all fed with digital content sold on SD card instead.

A number of bullets were dodged as the European Parliament voted on the Harbour proposals for the European broadcast, telecoms and internet industries this week. A couple, sadly, struck home all the same.

T-Mobile UK has announced a range of prepaid mobile broadband options that come with a USB dongle for a laptop, taking on the wildly successful similar offering from 3. This move also shows how the mobile data sector is changing quickly to support new revenue streams and new breeds of users for the hard pressed cellcos.

China's Shenzhou VII spacecraft blasted off today at 13:10 GMT from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern Gansu Province atop a Long-March II-F rocket. The mission marks the communist state's third manned space jaunt, and the first to include a spacewalk - if all goes according to plan.

The provisional launch date of space shuttle Atlantis on its STS-125 mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope has been postponed from 10 to 14 October due to the knock-on effects of Hurricane Ike.

Thieves bagged new networking gear worth tens of thousands of pounds in the early hours of this morning in a raid on BT's Stepney Green exchange - just two weeks after its Mayfair facility was burgled.

Steve McIntyre knew he faced a huge task when he took on the job of Debian project leader nearly six months ago. But he didn't reckon on the scandal of a major security bug, followed by a massive clear-up operation within a few days of taking over.

One of the most frustrating aspects of open source but commercially supported software is that it takes many orders of magnitude of freebie customers to attain a base of core customers who will pay for a glorified product with commercial-grade installation and ongoing tech support. There is always a temptation to try to monetize the vast installed base of users who are making use of the so-called development or community editions of programs. But Red Hat isn't going for it.

With Windows HPC Server 2008, the parallel supercomputing variant of Microsoft's Windows operating system, being released this week, there are probably a lot more people who want to see how it works than are willing to shell out a lot of cash to give it a whirl. And that is one reason why IBM has set up a test drive of Windows HPC Server on a number of compute utilities.

Lionel Cavalliere, VMware's senior product manager in EMEA, says that ESX exerts a shrinking effect on operating systems. The thinking goes like this: An operating system arbitrates access to physical resources between multiple applications and has lots and lots of driver code in its disk image.

A serious vulnerability has been found in yet another computerized control system that runs some of the world's most critical infrastructure, this time in a product sold by a vendor known as the ABB Group.

Asteroid impacts on Earth are an unfortunate inevitability. And while devastating impacts are extremely rare in terms of a human lifespan, the destruction they can potentially cause is far greater than more familiar natural disasters.

After months of controversy over ISP-level ad targeting systems from the likes of Phorm and NebuAd, three of America's four largest ISPs have told Congress that such behavior tracking shouldn't exist unless web surfers give their explicit approval.